June 30
Woke up this morning with a much cooler temperature than we have had. We packed up, got our breakfast eaten, and prepared to head out on the trail. As is typical, I am packed up and ready to go and Ryan still has a yard sale on the table packing up. I’m going head out. He’ll catch up to me soon. It is 6:30 when my foot hits the trail.
As the sun comes out, my shadow, hiking partner joins me once again
This purple flower plant is everywhere. The bees seem to love it as you walk by you hear their buzzing as they go from flower to flower.
Off in the distance between the 2 Trees Highway 2 is visible climbing the grade. Once again this was the road walk required on my Pct hike two years ago. I much prefer the actual trail.
Sticking with the theme of Boy Scout memories this week, the Common Yarrow is one of the first edible plants I learned about during the wilderness survival. The white flower can be used as a soap and the leaves can be tucked into a gum and chewed on to relieve tooth pain.
The Islip Saddle parking lot sits below us. This is one of my camping locations in 23.
After leaving Islip Saddle, we go back into a another steep 2 mile uphill to the top of Mount Williamson, which we will circle around before dropping back to Highway 2.
As we wind the back down towards the highway, we pass an Americorp conservation crew doing some trail maintenance. I always love seeing these people helping to keep the trail in good condition.
We have dropped back down and crossed Highway 2. We’ve taken a few minutes to pull out our food and have a second breakfast with incredible Views. Today’s second breakfast is a berry breakfast crumble. It is made with a cup of granola 4 ounces of blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, and mangoes, which are all freeze dried on Trail when I am ready to eat I had 2 ounces of water and a tablespoon of coconut oil and altogether to rehydrate the fruit it is a delicious meal.
We’ve arrived at the endangered species, frog habitat trail closure. The alternate is a long road walk down highway 2, and then cuts through a campground back down to the trail. It’s a total of 4.7 miles. The actual closure covers in the area of 4 miles.
We have reached the Northern end of the closure and stopped for lunch at a beautiful stream with shallow pools of water full of small fish. If you look closely at the water pictures, you may see a few.
We got back on Trail and continued about a mile and a half. Something wasn’t feeling right to me. We had gone uphill for about a mile but then started dropping and I was pretty sure we were supposed to continue straight up for 3 miles. I checked our maps and found out that we were not on the PCT! we had gone a mile and half up the Burkhardt Trail! We turned around and returned to what we thought was the end of the closure area, and as it turns out the closure was actually .1 mile farther up Trail. Our wrong turn was a 3 mile mistake.
Once we returned to the correct section of Trail, we continued on up 3 miles to cloudburst Summit. At this location, the trail crosses Highway two once again. I road walked all the way to this location in 2023 due to heavy snow conditions. Even though we had 3 miles of wasted time and effort on the Burkhardt Trail I did get to put my feet on the entire PCT That we had to walk along side of. Two years ago. It felt really good.
We stopped for the day at Camp Glenwood. It is a private Boy Scout camp that has picnic tables, pit toilet and water. The water comes from a tank through a metal pipe that is exposed to the sun so it was somewhat warm. Ryan used his 3 L water bag with a smaller nozzle tip to make a shower for us. It was quite refreshing, and warm. It’s a comfortable evening.
We had a good dinner and are getting ready for bed. I climbed into my tent at the beginning of sunset. I looked out the side mesh window of my tent and the hills behind us were ablaze in Orange.
